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The Royal Astronomical Society reported the first detection of material falling directly into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light, thanks to a super-massive black hole located in galaxy PG211 + 143. The discovery tells us something about the way the gas is sucked into the esophagus from a black hole – and the process is more complicated than you think.
If you read this site in the first place, you probably have an idea of how black holes work. They are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape them. But we can see the light of the gas that dives to the black hole, and large concentrations of gas and dust around a black hole are known as the accretion disk. However, accretion disks are not passive collections of material that are broadcast directly to a small black dot. They orbit, and at fierce speeds. These discs are not necessarily clean aligned with their black holes either. The interactions between the strips of material can produce different rings moving at different speeds.
Image by K. Pounds et al. / University of Leicester
What the observers of the Royal Astronomical Society have managed to capture is a complex gas interaction that has allowed some of the material to fall directly into the black hole, allowing them to measure its velocity. And that speed was phenomenal. From RAS:
The researchers found that the spectra were strongly red-shifted, showing that the observed material was falling into the black hole at the enormous speed of 30% of the speed of light, about 100,000 kilometers per second. The gas has almost no rotation around the hole and is detected extremely close to it in astronomical terms, at a distance of only 20 times the size of the hole (its event horizon, the limit of the region where the leak is no longer possible).
Prof. Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester led the effort and used ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to take measurements in the black hole.
"The galaxy we observed with XMM-Newton has a black hole of 40 million solar masses that is very bright and obviously well fed. Indeed, 15 years ago, we detected a strong wind indicating that the hole was supercharged, "said Pounds. "While such winds are now present in many active galaxies, the PG1211 + 143 has now given another" first ", detecting the material plunging directly into the hole itself. matter of the size of the Earth for about a day because it was pulled toward the black hole, accelerating up to one third of the speed of light before being engulfed by the hole.
This chaotic accretion pattern could explain how supermassive black holes become such colossal sizes, especially the super black holes in the primitive universe. The complex interaction between the gases in the accretion disk means that more material can be eaten up by the black hole during a given period of time. The material that falls directly "down" to the black hole is eaten much faster than the material that rotates tightly.
Now read: Physicists may have detected the remains of black holes in another universe, astronomers discover the tiny galaxy surrounding the monster A black hole and astronomers observe a black hole
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